Saturday, April 30, 2016

Bristol City Council is
still weathering the storm it brought down upon itself for not marking St
George’s Day this year, having argued that the city is ‘too multicultural’ for
such an event.Lack of interest might
have been a plausible excuse, but not that all cultures are valued except one.

Others do things
differently.Professor John Denham is
Director of Winchester University’s Centre for English Identity and
Politics.Interviewed by Wessex Society
for its magazine The Wessex Chronicle,
he recalled the situation in Southampton
during his time as a Labour MP there:

“I helped organise St George’s Day in
Southampton and Southampton’s a very diverse city – so how do you have a St
George’s Day which can involve everybody and yet is still an English
festival?The story we tell is that Southampton
is a great English city, that’s been there throughout English history, and it’s
always been made up of all the people who’ve lived there, which because it’s a
port city has always been people from all over the world.People can understand that you can be both
English and very diverse, through your history and everybody that’s come
together to make the city.A couple of
years ago I was working on this with a young Sikh woman councillor, born in
Southampton, and we discovered that we both had had relatives in the British
forces serving in the Far East during the
Second World War.That’s an example of
how family and local histories can be inter-twined as part of a common story.”

The
difference then is that Southampton projects the primacy of territory, locally
and nationally – loyalty to place rather than to race – whereas Bristol appears scared of
any continuity with its foundational past.Curiously, when it comes to Wessex and the marking of St Ealdhelm’s Day, the
roles are reversed.Bristol
is happy to fly the Wyvern outside the Council House (or ‘City Hall’, for the
Anti-Mayor and his fellow deniers of distinctiveness); Southampton
still sits in stony silence, unmoved by calls to fly.Perhaps this will be the year Southampton sees sense?

Monday, April 25, 2016

Every year when we submit
our accounts to the Electoral Commission we are also required to provide a 'Review of Political
Activities' covering the year just gone.

The 2015 Review has recently been forwarded to the Commission and here is what
it says:

“The major event of the year was the General
Election, which saw our President, Colin Bex return to Oxfordshire to again
challenge David Cameron for the safe Tory seat of Witney.The overall result was no surprise but Colin
was pleased to see a 77% increase in his own vote and a midway ranking among
the candidates, concluding that if voters remain willing to keep their options
open this bodes well for the future.Indeed,
it was our best result since 2001.The first-past-the-post
voting system continues to disadvantage smaller parties; it creates
presumptions about who is worth hearing that prevent a minor party candidate
even putting forward an alternative point of view.This was again the case at Witney, where Colin
and other minor party candidates were barred from even attending the
hustings.Local press coverage was seriously
incompetent, even to the point of publishing inexcusable untruths, though full colour feature articles in both editions of the Wall Street Journal ensured global awareness of the Wessex cause.

The importance of online activities was
underlined by a sharp spike in viewing figures for the Party’s blog during the
campaign.In April, there were nearly
3,000 page-views, nearly double the peak of interest during the Eastleigh by-election in 2013.In May, the Party was left without a core website
following the catastrophic failure of the Zyweb platform that hosted it.Thanks to Rick Heyse, a new Full Member with
the requisite skills, the Party now has a new site – www.wessexregionalists.info– to which are gradually being added the
range of features increasingly expected of a party website in the 21st century.Colin Bex has been an active ambassador for
the Party, attending conferences on climate change, in Paris, and democracy, in
Brussels, and the June march in London
against austerity.On the march, he
spoke with Jeremy Corbyn, soon to be the Labour Leader, about the need for
regionalism.

A wholly Conservative Government took
office in May with some two-thirds of the electorate either
not supporting or actively opposing it.It has demonstrated a deep hostility towards regionalism and local
democracy, even as financial pressures compel public services to re-organise on
a regional basis.It continues to
advance the view – shared with Labour – that the imposition of unwanted elected
mayors is a preferable substitute for substantial devolution to democratic regional
assemblies.In the second half of 2015
our attention shifted to the May 2016 local elections.Nick Xylas was endorsed as the Party’s
candidate for Bristol City Council, Eastville Ward and much activity has
focused on developing a framework for that campaign.

Policies adopted during the year have emphasised
our radical difference from the current mainstream.The Party now explicitly supports a
confederal ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’, more
democratic governance of public limited companies and a referendum on the
future of the monarchy, while opposing child genital mutilation, ritual
slaughter and the renewal of Trident.We
continue to benefit from the ‘Scotland
effect’ as the SNP consolidates its hold and voters in England also look around for alternatives to the
failed London
parties. The level of justifiable
optimism within the Party is higher than for many, many years.”

Thursday, April 7, 2016

With 11.5 million documents
to read through, we’ve not heard the last of the revelations from the Panama
Papers.David Cameron is on the
defensive, though Jeremy Corbyn’s attacks are blunted by the fact that his
party was once led by one half of the Blair couple, now rumoured to be worth a
cool £60 million.If Labour’s a party
with the interests of the common man at heart, it certainly hasn’t acted like
one.

Equally revealing is the
information that Cameron blocked EU plans for greater transparency over
trusts.It brings into sharp relief
what’s at stake in the EU referendum because the issue presented as pro- or
anti-Brussels can in fact be reversed and presented as pro- or
anti-London.Brexit won’t deliver
regionalism but it could very easily produce a London regime on steroids.Johnson as Prime Minister, ousting the
fatally discredited thinking of the Cameron / Osborne axis, but even more in thrall
to City backers.Massive deregulation
paving the way for active promotion of the UK as the place for the globally
corrupt to do business.London
helping itself to still more of the national wealth while denying other parts
of the UK
still more of the powers needed to turn themselves around.Openly, the fight for Brexit is being fought
in the name of democracy, and on that score sound points can be made, but,
behind the scenes, kleptocracy would be the real winner.

A clear pointer to the
direction of travel appeared this week when Dominic Grieve highlighted that
tax-dodging is an industry that provides a great many much-needed jobs.In places like the British
Virgin Islands that matter so much to all of us, if we can just remember
where they are.It does indeed provide
jobs, socially useless ones, just as it destroys socially useful jobs by
denying the public purse the funds with which to sustain them.Such is the mentally sick, insecure society
that Thatcherism has spawned, ferreting around for whatever bits of work are on
offer from a parasite class to whom caps must forever be doffed.Dismantling the tax havens is technically a very
easy thing to do; it’s just politically impossible to pass the necessary legislation
because of a longstanding Wesm’ster consensus against it.

George Osborne’s plan to
nationalise all local authority schools, and then privatise them – a bit like
the Dissolution of the Monasteries – is another pointer to the direction of
travel.Academies don’t have to teach
the national curriculum, so it will presumably disappear, along with parent
governors and any other vestige of democracy that might give children the wrong
idea about how our society can be run.Why would you need a national curriculum, written down and open to
challenge, when it can simply be ‘understood’ by the chief executives of the
big McSchool academy chains?Understood, that is, to mean teaching that a fraudster is just a better
entrepreneur than the competition, that tax-dodging is wealth creation and that
the only thing the law-abiding individual need ever fear is the over-mighty
State?Dis-education and mis-education
are the new battleground because what you don’t know can’t hurt you, can it?

Englishness is many things
but one of the most cherished is a love of secrecy, or privacy as it’s
usually termed, a pathological distrust of the other that underpins the
rejection of any potential for collective action.It’s why we prefer houses, even in city
centres, to the flats that those on the mainland regard as a far more rational
use of land.Across most of Scandinavia, tax returns are public documents: folk don’t
have hang-ups about what they earn or the tax they pay on it.Perhaps they believe they really have earned
it: so many of our top ‘earners’ know deep down that their salaries are out of
all proportion to their real social value.English society, obsessed with covering up the truth in order to protect
a ruling class who aren’t worth their privileges, is a society at war with
itself.The rulers keep winning by
setting each serf against all the rest and presenting themselves as the good
guys.It’s been like that for 950 years.

The system was imposed from
outside, from Normandy.Can it be overthrown from within, or will it
take some major help from Brussels
to achieve our liberation?The history
of those 950 years furnishes one very clear answer.